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Euro 2024 and German Efficiency: Get Ready for a Whole New Game


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Germany vs Hungary

,

Croatia vs Albania


and


Scotland vs Switzerland


at Euro 2024 today

Efficiency. Reliability. Functionality.

That’s what many people most associate with Germany, but so far at the 2024 European Championship, none of those cliches have been proven true. Tournament organisers have struggled with crowd control outside stadiums. Fans have endured miserable conditions on the way to and from games. Metro and rail services within the host cities have failed under the extra demand.

It is not what the rest of Europe expected to find.

On Friday night, Euro 2024 began in Munich. The city is used to serving big football crowds, with Bayern Munich selling out their 80,000-capacity Allianz Arena game after game, year after year.

The journey from the centre of town is usually simple enough, via a metro train (on the U-Bahn) that rattles north and delivers fans at Frottmaning station, which is a 10-minute walk from the stadium. For big games, it can get busy. But outside the ground, for Bundesliga and Champions League matches, everything works well enough and supporters find the areas they need.

On Friday night, it could not have been more different. The line that runs out of Munich and up to Frottmaning ground to a halt. Trains stopped at platforms and in tunnels for long periods and grew fuller. Munich has a warm climate, especially in June, and it was to the great credit of the Germany and Scotland supporters that, even though they were jammed up against each other, with no room to move, the mood stayed calm.

Outside the Allianz Arena — in scenes that have been repeated at other games played since — it was chaos. For Bayern games, fans are signposted towards certain entrances, depending on where in the stadium they are sitting. On Friday, the zoning failed, creating one big queue in front of the ground. Some were outside for hours.

On reaching the front of the line, many fans had no choice but to physically push through the crowds to find their entrance, much to the annoyance of others who misinterpreted what was happening, which resulted in a few fleeting flare-ups.

Organisation around Bundesliga games is generally excellent across the country. Many of the supporters in attendance, particularly the German fans, would also have had prior experience of Allianz Arena before and yet this was wildly different.

The first game of a major tournament often brings opening-night wrinkles and issues, but what happened in Munich was strange — and it was just the start.


Fans queuing outside the ground on Sunday in Gelsenkirchen (Oguz Yeter/Anadolu via Getty Images)

On Sunday night, England played Serbia in Gelsenkirchen. Bad stories have emerged from before and after the game.

There was gridlock and congestion on the tram service from the station to Arena AufSchalke, the out-of-town stadium, to the extent that some fans chose to walk the entire way instead — about an hour and a half from the city’s central station. England’s 1-0 victory ended up being a sub-plot to stories of crying children, heavy rain and, in a lot of cases, confusion.

Steve Grant, an England fan who follows the team home and abroad, did take public transport to the ground and said overcrowding at the station was so “dangerous” that “if you were stood at the platform edge, you were using your entire body weight to stop yourself being pushed onto the track”. He said there were “no crowd control measures in place at all”.

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England fan group criticises ‘serious issues in Gelsenkirchen’ over Euro 2024 game

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